Gold, silver, pgms, mining and geopolitical comment and news

pgm price predictions

An article written by me for www.sharpspixley.com to estimate where I think precious metals prices may be in a year’s time:

Predicting precious metals prices for the year ahead can be an invidious task and I have to say that, although I considered my guesstimates for 2018 made a year ago as fairly conservative they were nearly all out by an order of magnitude. My only consolation, perhaps, is that they were no more so than those of most other precious metals professional analysts and observers.

In the event, as the year played out to the full, gold at least outperformed equity markets by being almost flat over the full year despite underperforming general stocks for much of the period. Equities, after performing well earlier on, came down with a bit of a bang over the final few weeks of the year and long term gold holders will have done better than those who held on to their general stocks.

My one prediction which turned out to be very accurate was that for bitcoin – not a precious metal at all – which I predicted would come down very sharply, as it did. I was also looking for a sharp fall in general equities, but it took the final few weeks of the year for this to happen – prior to which they had performed fairly positively.

But herewith my best guesses for precious metals performance in the current year. In general the projections for gold and silver are much the same as those I made a year ago – but perhaps a little more conservative. OK, my timing was wrong a year ago but I see many of the factors likely to drive prices in the year ahead as actually being much the same. Let’s hope I am more accurate in my guesstimates this time around.

In general in 2018 precious metals had a fairly dismal year, with the exception of palladium and for much of the year, after a promising first quarter, were strongly outperformed by equities. But in the final few weeks of 2018, equities came off very sharply and gold holders did rather better with the yellow metal coming off its lows. As I pointed out in a previous article here, the strong dollar meant that gold actually performed even better – indeed positively – over the year in most countries other than the U.S.A. and with equities declining even more in most other countries than in the U.S. gold did indeed work rather well as a safe haven – as it is supposed to. Some of the final figures and percentage changes over the full year are noted in the table below, but these figures are in U.S. dollars and with the U.S. dollar index (DXY) rising quite sharply (around 5%) over the full year gold actually increased in value in many other currencies which made it an even better performer in these nations.

Metal Price or Index Level

Price/Level 1/1/2018

Price/Level 1/1/2019

% Change

Gold (US$)

$1,306

$1,282

-1.8%

Silver (US$)

$17.06

$15.47

-9.3%

Platinum (US$)

$947

$794

-16.2%

Palladium (US$)

$1,087

$1,252

+15.2%

Dow Jones Industrial

24,824

23,327

-6.0%

S&P 500

2,696

2,507

-7.0%

NASDAQ

7,007

6,635

-5.3%

Nikkei

23,506

20,015

-14.9%

DAX

12,871

10,559

-18.0%

FTSE 100

7,648

6,728

-12.0%

Bitcoin

$13,445

$3,717

-72.4%

Gold: The most significant of the precious metals being covered given that where gold goes the others tend to follow – more or less – despite the fact that industrial demand becomes more and more significant as one moves through the precious metals list. My prediction for the gold price at this time next year is a conservative US$1,400 – up a little over 10%. ……..

To read the full article which includes my price estimates for silver, platinum and palladium too on sharpspixley.com’s metalsdaily website click on: